Hypnotherapy Helps!

How Can It Help You?  Hypnotherapy helps anyone who wants to

make a change or solve a problem, as long as they are ready to achieve their goals!  

It's one of the most effective solutions to many common concerns, such as smoking cessation, weight loss, chronic pain management, and the relief of symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety.

How Does it Help?  Through a collaboration between the client and

practitioner, hypnosis is used to clear obstacles

preventing the achievement of goals, reduce symptoms, allow for creative problem solving,
and bring about changes to behavior, habits, and beliefs.  

Why it works:

   1. Through hypnosis, a client can change underlying

subconscious beliefs that are blocking the ability to alter habits,

reach goals, and access solutions. Hypnosis helps a client commit to new habits,

lifestyle improvements, and new ways of thinking.

    2. Hypnosis quiets the activity of the amygdala in the brain, the part that reacts to fear, stress, and anxiety.  Activation of the amygdala clouds the ability to see situations clearly. Our ability to understand and create possible solutions becomes shut down. Through hypnosis, we are able to quiet the amygdala and activate the parts of the brain that allow us to interpret our situation more effectively, generate solutions, and adjust our behavior. 

   3. By quieting the amygdala, and allowing the parts of the brain

that can think critically and creatively to function better,

the body and mind benefit from improvements to blood pressure, cortisol levels, and immune system function, and also from reduced stress, increased creativity, and improved problem solving. All of these factors improve how we feel, how we think, how we function, and how we heal.

   4. Hypnosis can change our perceptions.  All of what we perceive through our senses:

hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, smelling, is processed through our brains,

especially our limbic region, or emotional processing center.  

The brain takes the signals from our senses and combines

them with our thoughts about those signals to create our experience.

By changing either of those factors: the signals from the senses coming in from the brain,

or how we think about those signals, we change our experience

and our feelings about our experience.   

5. Hypnosis can change our habits.  Often, our habits are behaviors that worked at one

point in time, for whatever reason, but no longer serve us in the present. The problem is that

during times of stress, fatigue, anger, or just when we get distracted or off schedule,

we often fall back on old behaviors because those have become our default setting.
Hypnosis brings out these old, outworn habits and allows our brains to reassess what we are
doing, and then process a new behavior.
Hypnosis can change our default setting, making it much more likely
that we will stick to the new behavior.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Hypnotherapy!   

Make an Appointment Today!

Individualized Weight Loss Programs (HAES focus optional)

Smoking Cessation

Chronic Pain Management

Stress Reduction

Lifestyle Improvement

Age Regression

Freedom from Fears

Reduce Symptoms of Stress, Anxiety, Depression

Improve Performance, Improve Relationships, Improve Quality of Life!

Call, Text, or Email today to find out more or to make an appointment!  

978-257-3670, tinamgrasso@gmail.com, Facebook: @Tina M Grasso!

How Can Hypnosis Help with Weight Loss?

How Can Hypnosis Help You Reach and Maintain a Healthy Weight?

   
       Hypnosis supports weight loss effort in a variety of ways.  First, it can help to change our relationship with food.  Through hypnosis, we can come to see food as an enjoyable way to nourish our bodies. We can be allowed to let go of food as entertainment, comfort, and company.
How can hypnosis do this? Well, our subconscious mind is a creature of habit. When the going gets tough, or we are stressed, lonely, angry, upset or anxious, we fall back on old behavior patterns, because that is what our subconscious mind has learned has worked in the past.

       For some of us, as children, we were offered food as comfort and entertainment.  For some of us, when we were stressed, food was the only comfort available to us.  Or, we learned to use food as entertainment.  Others learned it was the one thing we could control. When we are young, we do not have control over our lives and we cannot think as critically as we can as adults about our circumstances.  What works for us in the moment becomes ingrained in our minds as fall back behavior: the cookie helped distract us from our boredom or loneliness. Getting take out or going out for dinner was a time of fun or relief from stress. Eating might have been one of the most pleasurable times of the day, or, maybe, the time during the day when we felt most connected to others.

Now,  it's not that any of these things are bad things to do, but when they get in the way of our goals, we need to make changes.  Many of us try, over and over again, to make changes. But we find ourselves falling back on old behaviors.  This is not because we are weak minded, gluttonous, or unaware of what we "should" be doing.  It's because we have some powerful underlying beliefs about food and its role in our lives.

    These beliefs and patterns stay with us, working under the surface, and drive our behavior.  This is why we can find ourselves not eating the way we intended; we can lay careful plans for a week of healthy meals, and then as the days roll on and the stress rises, we find ourselves driving through the drive thru or eating ice cream on the couch. This is our subconscious mind's way of taking care of us. This is what it has learned makes us feel better, it thinks it is solving the problem.

                                                       So, how can hypnosis help? 

      The good news is that the subconscious mind can be taught new tricks. Through hypnosis, we can teach the subconscious mind a new way of coping with external factors.  It can be taught that a nice walk, a call to a friend, engaging in a hobby or activity, a cold drink of water, listening to music, or any other positive habit we would like to develop, can help us feel calmer, more connected, less stressed,  happier.

      And once we start this process, it doesn't stop. We start to learn, really learn, how to use true self care to meet our needs, so we can start to put food back into its place: an enjoyable way to nourish our bodies at meal times, and that is all.

        Hypnosis helps us on another level, too. Because many of us fall back on old behaviors when stress rises. When we are anxious, fearful, or stressed the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear responses, is activated.  When he amygdala is activated, it overrides other parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, and we lose the ability to perceive our environment and our situation clearly.  We also lose the ability to come up with creative solutions or new behaviors. When our amygdala is in charge, we go back to what has worked in the past, and can't really see any other options.

         Under hypnosis, because it is such a deep state of relaxation, the amygdala quiets down. Our fear response subsides, and we are able to see all of our options more clearly, think creatively, problem solve and try new things. We can take the risk to reach out to someone or try something new.

       Hypnosis can also help us retrain how we perceive information coming into our senses. A skilled hypnotherapist can help us learn that healthy food is delicious, and also help us notice that junk food makes us feel poorly.  It can help us be aware of fullness and hunger. It can help us remember to take good care of ourselves so that stress and anxiety do not rise.

      These are just some examples of how hypnosis can help us reach our weight and health goals. It's hard to overstate just how powerful of a tool hypnosis can be.  If you would like to learn more, please  don't hesitate to contact me!

Hypnosis: A Misunderstood Power Tool

Hypnosis is a Misunderstood Yet Powerful Tool.

           When I first decided to become a hypnotist, many people looked at me strangely.  Because we have been mislead about what it is and how it works. It's actually one of the most powerful tools we have for behavior change and reducing the symptoms of stress. The uses for hypnosis are many, but the premise remains the same for almost all problems we are trying to solve with it: 

             Often to change our behavior, we have to change the way we think. We have to change the story we tell ourselves about what we are doing and why.

     Sounds simple, but it's not. We all have beliefs we developed early on, really before our critical minds could truly understand the impacts of those beliefs.  Those beliefs drive our behavior, and become our habits. These old beliefs stick around under the surface of things, driving our behavior behind the scenes. 

     

    As children, we do not have the ability to think critically the way we can when we are adults.  We believe much of what we are told, and develop behaviors to cope with our environment and our primary relationships. These default behaviors become ingrained, they become our fallback behavior.

      This is why we can have the best of intentions to start a new eating plan, a new exercise routine. We can decide we want to get up earlier, read more, be kinder, spend less money, stop smoking.  And, we can do all of these things for short periods of time, when we are focusing and using our willpower.  But willpower is a muscle that is not meant to be used all of the time.  It wears out. When stress rises, our schedule changes, or life happens, we fall back on our default behavior. Because our subconscious mind believes this default behavior is what works for us. This is the behavior, it thinks, that helps with the stress, fear, anger, exhaustion, or whatever it is that has come up.

      Hypnosis is a way to directly communicate with the subconscious mind.  Most of the time, our critical mind, our conscious mind, protects our subconscious. We don't allow new ideas in there very often.  When we work with a skilled hypnotist, though, we can communicate directly with this part of our mind to help it change the story.  We can bring these old, subconscious ideas and beliefs to the forefront of our minds, examine them, and change them. 

    Hypnosis is a powerful tool that can be used in so many ways. It can help us change our relationship with food, stop smoking, develop a daily exercise routine, reduce stress, anger, and fear. It can help us examine behavior that does not work in our own best interests. It can help us take the steps we need to take to reach goals we thought would always be out of reach. It can help us improve work and study habits, as well as performance. It can reduce anxiety.  It can help us manage chronic pain, symptoms of illnesses. It can help us improve relationships and create new ones. It can seriously improve the overall quality of our lives.

   Consider using hypnosis if you are attempting to make changes in your life. You will find it a powerful method to support changes. It's a relaxing, pleasurable, interesting journey that brings about results that can amaze you.  If you would like to learn more, please feel free to contact me!